Unreal Realism.

• Author: Emmons, Terence
• Position: Review

Jonathan Haslam, The Vices of Integrity: E.H. Carr, 1892-1982 (New York: Verso, 1999), 240 pp., $35.

"BEFORE you study the history, study the historian. ... Before you study the historian, study his historical and social environment." This advice has been taken up and applied with excellent results to its source, E.H. Carr (1892-1982), one of twentieth-century Britain's most prominent historians and public intellectuals, by Jonathan Haslam, who was a research associate of Carr's during the last decade of the indefatigable historian's long life. Excellent results, that is, for our understanding of this unusually complicated and highly individualistic historian, but also for our understanding of his times, for Carr truly was a product of his historical and social environment. His is a cautionary tale about ideology and power, and a significant chapter in the story of the Soviet impact on the Western world.

In his once widely cited 1962 lectures on What is History?, Carr gave a summary definition of history as a "dialogue between the events of the past and progressively emerging future ends." The historian who has a "long-term vision over the past and over the future", who "approaches towards the understanding of the future", can aspire to durability and approach "objectivity." A daunting task, no doubt, but an important one, for the function of history is not only to understand the past, but to "increase [man's] mastery over the society of the present." Add to this the eloquent subscription to "History as Progress" and we have a key to Carr's intellectual biography and to his achievement as a historian.

Edward Hallett Carr, author of The Twenty Years' Crisis, the immense History of Soviet Russia, What is History? and much else, was born into a modest, but well-educated, middle-class Victorian business family in the north of London. He was educated on a scholarship at Merchant Taylors' day school in central London, where he excelled, especially in Greek, and gained a reputation as a standoffish nerd. By this time, he had become a fervent supporter of the free-trade, social reform liberalism of Lloyd George.

Exempted from military call-up in World War I by a bout of rheumatic fever in his early college years, he was drafted into the Foreign Office upon graduating from Cambridge with distinction in June 1916. Carr was to remain in the foreign service for twenty years. Russia, the country to whose history his later work as historian would be principally devoted, first came to his attention in connection with his department's work in supplying Britain's wartime allies, and then, after the October Revolution, in the matter of keeping supplies out of the hands of the Bolsheviks. Carr, innocent of the Russian language, went with the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference as a "Russian expert" and remained there until 1921. From late 1921 through 1924 he was back in London, and in 1925 he was posted as second secretary to the British legation in Riga, Latvia, where he remained until he was returned to the Foreign Office in March 1929. Inundated with Russian emigres, Riga after the war was the main Western lis tening post for Soviet developments. It was here that Carr took up the study of the Russian language and began the preoccupation with Russia that dominated much of the rest of his life. [1]

The first fruits of Carr's independent Russian studies were books on several great nineteenth-century Russian figures--Dostoevsky, Herzen, and Bakunin--each famous in his own way for that questioning of conventional values and rejection of the juste milieu that was the hallmark of the Russian intelligentsia. Long since outdated, these books remain instructive about their author. Haslam argues persuasively that Carr's biographies of these radical individualists--ironical, detached and disinclined to take seriously the role of ideas in their lives--helped to liberate the historian from his own upbringing and received beliefs--helped, in other words, to turn him into the radical individualist that he would remain for the rest of his life. They also demonstrate Carr's dissatisfaction with his career in the Foreign Office, which he left in 1936.

By this time, his preoccupation with international affairs had taken over. Carr's observations of the great powers' behavior at the Paris Peace Conference and then at the League of Nations in Geneva undermined his early belief in a natural concert of nations and a liberal economic order guided by the...